The projected cost from all the 2012 elections according to opensecrets.org is $5,803,829,964. Of that, approximately $2 billion went into the presidential race. Yea, it’s a lot. These people who so desperately fought for their seats said whatever it took to get elected regardless of whether it was something they believed in. The government in which they work is responsible for trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives, so it’s not really about how much money they spent on their campaigns or what the relentless commercials rambled on about, it’s about what happens next. Rather than anxiously awaiting the results from tightly contested races, I and another decided to take the plunge into Lake Erie for an invigorating jolt of Cleveland’s finest weathered water. Not learning the results of the election until the next morning, I was able to think of better days and how much can be achieved by rational people. Sadly, the hostility of the election will probably continue. No matter where you live, what you do, who you see, and how you choose to think, there’ll continue to be a status quo of division and anger in America. And instead of billion dollar political campaigns taking up most of our field of vision, we’ll have billion dollar consumer campaigns. Last year, the top ten advertisers spent $26.2 billion and the top hundred spent $102.6 billion with the largest markets being for automobiles and cell phones. The NFL generates more ad revenue than presidential races, so take some perspective and relax. America, based upon the 2012 election, is going through adolescence, or it has regressed back to adolescence. There is still too much to do and the gerrymandered districts of many states has set America back even further from achieving progress in the 113th Congress. Who’s going to enter the game and relax the tension so that real work may again resume? As Clint Eastwood said during the Superbowl, it’s half-time in America. But then again, he too regressed to adolescent name calling by attacking a chair. Are we doomed? to be continued in a perspective for the e-book….